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You’re reading Dispatch Culture, our weekend newsletter featuring essays about American culture, staff recommendations, book reviews, and more.
Happy Saturday!
I’m taking over American Artifacts this weekend with a piece on Frederic Edwin Church, whose name you may recognize if you’ve ever been to an art museum and beheld a massive—and I mean massive—landscape painting.
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Add Us as a Preferred SourceValerie is Ideas Editor at The Dispatch, based in New York City. Prior to joining the company in 2025, she worked at The New York Times and NewsGuard Technologies, and she is currently a Novak Fellow through The Fund for American Studies. When Valerie isn’t commissioning and editing the next big essay for The Dispatch, she is probably people-watching in a funky cafe or scheming up her next oddly-themed party.
Nadya Williams is a senior fellow in the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, where she also serves as the interim director of the MFA program. She is books editor at Mere Orthodoxy, where she hosts the Christians Reading Classics podcast. Her latest book is Christians Reading Classics.
Alex Demas is an editor at The Dispatch and is based in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the company in 2023, he worked in England as a financial journalist and earned his MA in Political Economy at King's College London. When not heroically combating misinformation online, Alex can be found mixing cocktails, watching his beloved soccer team Aston Villa lose a match, or attempting to pet stray cats.